Falling overboard, almost drowned, an attractive girl goes under a personality change. Her memory gone, only her survival instinct left, she is taken to a priest's African missionary. Lilly wakes up night after night in her bed exhausted, blood on her mouth and gown. She begs the Father to lock her in at night. The two of them fall in love. She crashes in a plane, he thinks she is dead. He goes to Ireland, leaves the priesthood, falls in love, then tragedy strikes. He returns to Africa dreaming of Lilly until one day…
A Saint and a Sinner is the revealing true story of the rise and fall of a beloved Catholic priest; a hopeful story of a flawed man and his redemption. With a dominant presence and larger-than-life persona, ex-priest Stephen Donnelly, shares a brutally honest account of his personal journey of sinfulness; a cautionary tale of the struggle between good and evil that exists within all of us. Step behind the curtain of the mighty and mysterious Catholic Church as Stephen recounts his relationship with God, the faithful, the institution, bishops and accused pedophile priestsIn 1997, at the age of forty-two, Stephen was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. Standing before God, the bishop, his family and the congregation he made promises he struggled to keep. Three years into his priesthood he descended into a world of cocaine and alcohol abuse. After fellow priests intervened and after multiple stays in rehab, Stephen turned his life around and became well-known in Alcoholics Anonymous circles as the "Irish priest with a problem."During his seven years as Associate Pastor at St. Patrick's Church, Huntington, New York he was known among parishioners as a "rock star." They were among the best years of his life. He was Stephen; the man, the Catholic and the priest at his absolute best.But, in 2017, while assigned to a new parish, the unthinkable happened which threatened to destroy everything he held dear.
This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French society. Both contributed to the French people’s ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king. Choudhury builds her story through an extensive examination of archival material, including trial records, pamphlets, periodicals, and unpublished correspondence from witnesses. The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint offers new insights into how the eighteenth-century public interpreted the accusations and why the case consumed the public for years, developing from a local sex scandal to a referendum on religious authority and its place in French society and politics.
In this classic Catholic novel, Bernanos movingly recounts the life of a young French country priest who grows to understand his provincial parish while learning spiritual humility himself. Awarded the Grand Prix for Literature by the Academie Fran?aise, The Diary of a Country Priest was adapted into an acclaimed film by Robert Bresson. A book of the utmost sensitiveness and compassion? it is a work of deep, subtle and singularly encompassing art.? ? New York Times Book Review
Lauren Faulkner Rossi plumbs the moral justifications of Catholic priests who served willingly and faithfully in the German army in World War II. She probes the Church’s accommodations with Hitler’s regime, its fierce but often futile attempts to preserve independence, and the shortcomings of Church doctrine in the face of total war and genocide.
While dissolute bishops and priests around the world grab headlines for their untoward words and deeds, too many other unfruitful priests minister as little more than glad-handing bachelors doing social service work. Top and bottom, is this the Church that Christ intended? Are these the priests we need? “No!” cries author Kevin Wells in these compelling pages that showcase how heroic priests can faithfully tread the narrow path of holy self-sacrifice first blazed by the apostles themselves. From scores of insightful interviews with modern priests, exorcists, seminary formators, and even disillusioned laity, Wells here draws forth a blueprint for priestly holiness that can once again fill our Church with priests abounding with sincere, supernatural faith, on fire with God's love, and moved by the irresistible impulse to save souls, no matter the cost to themselves. Reading this book will deepen your own faith and help you understand what all priests, by their vocation, are consecrated and called to be. Giving a copy to your parish priest will help him – and encourage him – as he strives to become a member of the small but growing contingent of holy priests we need.
The richness of the Catholic Church is found in the bonds of communion between the universal church and the local church. The bishop―the antistite, or high priest, as he is entitled in the Canon of the Mass―is the apostolic successor who, though always in communion with the pope, is likewise a vicar of Christ in his own right. Thus, the role of the bishop―and his understanding of his own ministry―can shape the personality of a diocese as well as its understanding of its place in the worldwide church. This Festschrift, written in honor of a bishop who has sought to enliven his diocese and remind it of its bonds of communion with the whole, aims to provide a multi-disciplined approach to the ministry of the diocesan bishop at a time when authority is held in suspicion, communion is seen as constricting, and obedience to those in authority is treated as an artifact of a bygone age. The assembled essays approach the question of the episcopal ministry from the perspective of the Catholic Church's theological tradition and aim to enlighten clergy and laity about the ministry of their bishops and encourage bishops themselves in exercising their sacred office.
Two abandoned souls are on the hunt for one powerful man. Soon, their paths will cross and lead to one twisted fate. Danny Hansen is a Bosnian immigrant who came to America with hopes of escaping haunted memories of a tragic war that took his other's life. Now he's a priest incensed by the powerful among us who manipulate the law for their own gain, uncaring of thes hattered lives they leave behind. It is his duty to show them the error of their ways, even if he must put them in the grave. Renee Gilmore is the frail and helpless victim of one such powerful man. Having escaped his clutches, she now lives only to satisfy justice by destroying him, regardless of whom she must become in that pursuit. But when Danny and Renee's paths become inexorably entangled things go very, very badly and neither of them may make it out of this hunt alive.
July 14, 2003: Flin Flon lawyer Michael Bomek pleads guilty to six counts of sexual assault on young Cree men, some of whom come from the community of Pelican Narrows. His crime is emblematic of white culture' s assault on this Rock Cree community. On the one hand, he was a dedicated lawyer who won 75 per cent of his cases for his native clients. On the other, he was an unthinkably corrupting influence. For over 200 years, Pelican Narrows has endured an equally torturous relationship with the encroaching European culture, from the Hudson Bay factors and missionaries of earlier times to the bureaucrats and police of today. By scrupulously researching the history of a community she has known for much of her life, by using oral history and documenting the personal stories of contemporary Pelican Narrows Cree, Siggins gives us the human face behind the newspaper headlines of native issues. Her storytelling powers are formidable and the portrait she gives us of this single Saskatchewan community is unforgettable.
Galilee is an American psychological thriller horror novel written by D.L. Tracey. It was first published by iUniverse publishers in December 2009, and then was re-published in 2021 by AuthorHouse publishers. The novel’s narrative is based on the relationship of its four main characters – the newly ordained young priest, Father Hickey, fresh out of seven very long years of seminary school. Young, overachieving, and ambitious priest is sent to a backwater parish--and to make matters even worse, the priest he will replace dies just before he gets there, throwing him into a strange situation with no guidance. The small parish The Church of Saint Peter at the edge of a fishing village was not what he hoped for as his first assignment. The young priest meets Michael McDonough, owner of The Crow’s Nest bar, while administering last rites to a fisherman on the docks of Galilee on his first day at the parish, and a friendship mentorship begins without the priest’s knowledge. A young waitress at the Crow’s Nest by the name of Janie befriends the young priest and allows him into her troubled past. The fourth person is Father Gilday, the priest who died a few days before the young priest’s arrival. Galilee is a story about the horror that can befall a fishing village when no one is piecing together the signs!
